[event] Teodora Groza: Governing Foundation Models

Speaker: Teodora Groza is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Tübingen. She has obtained a PhD in law from Sciences Po Law School and has held visiting positions at Harvard Law School and Stanford Law School. Her work is underlined by the belief that technological developments need to be paired with governance innovations and investigates the fitness of various legal interventions for ensuring AI alignment. Methodologically, she leverages the toolkit of law and economics, in particular organizational and institutional economics.

She has published on data markets, the governance of AI companies, the role of regulation in promoting innovation, and the impact of new business models on the EU and US antitrust frameworks. She regularly intervenes at academic, civil society, and industry conferences.

Description: Senior executives of frontier AI labs have recently described AI foundation models as either “infrastructures” or “platforms.” Although these terms are often used interchangeably in legal and governance debates, economists distinguish between the effects and incentive structures they generate. This talk examines the role of foundation models in today’s economy and disentangles their platform-like and infrastructure-like characteristics. Building on this distinction, it situates foundation models within the existing regulatory architectures of platforms (e.g. social media, digital marketplaces) and infrastructures (e.g. public utilities). It then analyzes how different governance choices would shape access, competition, and the allocation of regulatory authority.

Organizer: Thibault Schrepel, Associate Professor at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (ALTI).

Format: Teodora Groza will give a 30-minute talk, followed by a discussion moderated by Dr. Thibault Schrepel and a Q&A with the audience.